1. Thread ... I want to make a small China/FDI and Belt and Road comment, prompted by reading a few more pieces that dismiss the significance of the thing on grounds that China's pledges "don't add up" and its pledge numbers are "fake." This is a caveat from anecdotal experience.
2: In many places of the place where China Inc. or Chinese entities invest, I don’t think aggregate capital flows are a sufficient measure for understanding impact, real or prospective.
3: There are plenty of countries where the numbers aren’t large—and are often (much) smaller than advertised by the propaganda organs— but where China is either one of a very few outside investors or where global capital flows simply haven’t had an especially meaningful impact.
4: If you’re seeing, say, a hypothetical $150 million of Chinese FDI in XYZistan but more like $0 from anyone else except in, say, one or two extractive sectors, then the Chinese number isn’t huge but the impact *can* be for at least three reasons:
5: First reason: You can actually do quite a lot with just $150 million in XYZistan, including things that the country's elites want ... and where the public actually sees a material impact.
6: Second reason: Few other international investors are doing much of anything in XYZistan, or, as noted, they are doing things but in a couple of sectors only, often with little visible public impact.
7: Third reason: That means the *comparative* numbers, rather than the aggregate Chinese number, can tell you quite a bit about political, social, and material impact, both prospective and real.
8: It's another way to think about this, beyond just looking at a bunch of cumulative numbers, which, I agree, often do not add up. But doing this requires us to simultaneously do three things:
9: For one, it means we would need to be rather granular in terms of understanding what’s happening in individual countries rather than just in the aggregate before we are so dismissive.
10: For another, it means we should be less dismissive of China’s impact generally, for good or for ill, just because “the numbers don’t add up.” They may very well not add up and yet still amount to a good deal on the ground, with a meaningful effect on this or that in XYZistan.
11: Finally, it's why comparative thinking is more useful than weighing China's activities in a vacuum. Everything I read now declares for "competition." Good. But to compete, we can't just dismiss the other guy without reference to others. Competition means more than one player.
12: Sorry for the typos.
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🧵This piece by Peter Navarro in today’s @FT completes a bizarre narrative arc in which the administration now argues that the war is Ukraine’s fault enabled by India instead of Russia”s fault enabled by China and others. It is pure strategic malpractice. ft.com/content/286160…
2: Navarro says all sorts of things. The larger issue is that the secretary of State and other principals authorized it. So those who know better and are supposed to balance American interests either agree with it, don’t agree with it but authorized it anyway, or just don’t care.
3: As an exercise, swap “United States” for “India” and then “Pakistan” or even “China” for “Russia.” For 25 years, the U.S. and India have objected to this or that aspect of third-party relations. They never, until this administration, let it debilitate the whole relationship.
1:🧵on America's misperception of Asian challenges and aspirations. In this deep dive into America's role in Asia, I pull the thread on several themes that have dominated my work for over a decade and concern me hugely as a strategist and former diplomat: pacificpolarity.substack.com/p/evan-feigenb…
2: America's oversecuritization of its approach to Asia - Washington is long on security and short on pretty much everything else. As I sometimes tartly put it, the United States is in serious danger of becoming "the Hessians of Asia."
3: The strategic narcissism of filtering an entire Asia strategy through the prism of competition with China - in other words, rather than "getting China right by getting Asia right," making every policy, initiative, and relationship derivative of America's focus on Beijing.
1: It takes a unique kind of nihilism to think that everything the U.S. has done internationally was a scam except to project military power. Keep our market open? Scam. Trade pacts? Scam. Write rules from which others benefit too? Scam. Foreign assistance? Scam. Alliances? Scam.
2: There seems to be a lot of this going around. All these tools, from foreign assistance to alliances, had a deep well of bipartisan support for decades. They reflected a certain optimism not just about America’s role in the world but also about what America would gain not lose.
3: Skepticism isn’t the same as nihilism. We can be skeptical and question how much we gain, where, and how from our foreign policy. Those are robust debates. But quite a few people in my timeline have crossed from skepticism to arguing that such tools have never had value.
1: Blasts from my past. Have spent 15 years writing on (1) why "US vs. China" bipolarity is the wrong frame for the future of Asia; (2) the collision of economics and security; and (3) why pan-Asian ideas and institutions aren't "made in China." Here are some of my favorites.
2: From 2011, when Xi Jinping was barely out of the provinces and two years before China proposed the Belt and Road: Asia is being reconnected after a multicentury hiatus; the US is losing the plot and risks being marginalized; China isn't the only actor. csis.org/analysis/twq-w…
3: From 2012, written with my friend @Rmanning4: Security Asia and Economic Asia are diverging; the US is essential to the former but risks fading in the latter; China isn't the only actor. foreignpolicy.com/2012/10/31/a-t…
1: No, it really isn't fine. For one, it infantilizes third countries. And it doesn't reflect the complex experience many of them have had with China. BRI is not "a debt and confiscation program," although there are indeed very troubling cases. Above all, whining isn't competing.
2: The irony is that the US doesn't need to do this. There is plenty of suspicion of Chinese intent across the world today, including the Global South. Experience is an good teacher, so governments are learning and bargaining differently with China while mass publics demand more.
3: We have an entire initiative at @CarnegieEndow digging into complex lessons from around the world. And one of these is that local players are learning how to compel or persuade Chinese players to adapt to local ways, not simply accepting "Chinese" ways. carnegieendowment.org/specialproject…
1: Some background from me for the Xi trip to Moscow, where I expect Beijing to reinforce an entente that is both unsentimental and directed largely at shared ambivalence about (1) US foreign policy, (2) tools of US statecraft, e.g., sanctions, and (3) backfooting Washington.
2: A piece I wrote on Day 1 of Putin's war in Ukraine. I argued that Beijing faced irreconcilable interests and therefore had to choose among them or tack back and forth under the glare of international scrutiny. carnegieendowment.org/2022/02/24/chi…
3: This piece drew in part on personal experience with Beijing's response to Putin's aggression in Georgia in 2008, when I had only recently been the senior US official for Central Asia. Comparing 2022 to 2008 is instructive for seeing the evolution of Beijing's lean into Moscow.